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Chiron Codex: helping software engineers become centaurs. APPropriate Behaviour
The book about all the things software writers do that aren't writing software.
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Author Archives: Graham
First, Consider no Harmful.
Yesterday, we observed that the goal of considering the go to statement harmful was so that a programmer could write a correct program and have done with it. We noticed that this is never how computering works: many programs are … Continue reading
The unreasonable ineffectiveness of considering things harmful
Dijkstra didn’t claim to consider the go to statement harmful, not in those words. The title of his letter to CACM was provided by the editor, Niklaus Wirth, who did such a great job that the entire industry knows that … Continue reading
Empowered free software
Free and open source software has traditionally been defined as the opposite of something else: proprietary (or commercially-licensed) software. That’s particularly obvious in the name of the GNU project, which calls itself “Not UNIX” – a popular AT&T-owned commercial software … Continue reading
Posted in freesoftware, GNU
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Pairing in Github
In the world of free software, it’s good to appropriately credit contributors to your community for the work they do. git makes this hard when you pair program. I was at a hackathon recently, and while I didn’t make a … Continue reading
Posted in process, tool-support
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Everyone rejecting everyone else
It’s common in our cooler-than-Agile, post-Agile community to say that Agile teams who “didn’t get it” eschewed good existing practices in their rush to adopt new ways of thinking. We don’t need UML, we’re Agile! Working software over comprehensive documentation! … Continue reading
The feature constraint
If you’re in a purely software business, your constraining resource is often (not always, not even necessarily in most cases, but often) the rate at which software gets changed. Well, specifically, the rate at which software gets changed in a … Continue reading
Posted in software-engineering
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Immutable changes
The Fixed-Term Parliaments Act was supposed to bring about a culture change in the parliament and politics of the United Kingdom. Moving for the second reading of the bill that became this Act, Nick Clegg (then deputy prime minister, now … Continue reading
Posted in process
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On exploding boilers
Throughout our history, it has always been standardisation of components that has enabled creations of greater complexity. This quote, from Simon Wardley’s finding a path, reminded me of the software industry’s relationship with interchangeable parts. Brad Cox, in both Object-Oriented … Continue reading
Sprouts
Having discussed reasons for change with a colleague on my team, we came up with the sprouts of change. Good software is antifragile in the face of changing: Situation People Requirements Organisation Understanding Technology Society Like any good acronym, it’s … Continue reading
Posted in architecture of sorts
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Change
I was just discussing software architecture and next steps with a team building a tool to help analyse MRI images of brains. Most of the questions we asked explored ways to proceed by focussing on change: what if the budget … Continue reading
Posted in architecture of sorts
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